Quotes from Christopher Hitchens

Lovers often invest their first meetings with retrospective significance, as if to try and conjure the elements of the numinous out of the stubborn witness of the everyday. I

The bombers of Manhattan represent fascism with an Islamic face, and there's no point in any euphemism about it. What they abominate about 'the west,' to put it in a phrase, is not what Western liberals don't like and can't defend about their own system, but what they do like about it and must defend: its emancipated women, its scientific inquiry, its separation of religion from the state.

I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and now have succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me.

Never forget that the Muslim fundamentalists are not against 'empire.' They fight proudly for the restoration of their own lost caliphate.

It was Buddhist and Shinto priests who were recruiting and training the suicide bombers, or Kamikaze (Divine Wind), fanatics, assuring them the emperor was a Golden Wheel-Turning Sacred King, one indeed of the four manifestations of the ideal Buddhist monarch and a Tathagata, or fully enlightened being, of the material world.

In point of fact, we do not have the option of choosing absolute truth, or faith. We only have the right to say, of those who do claim to know the truth of revelation, that they are deceiving themselves and attempting to deceive - or to intimidate - others.

If you can't hear, I hope it's not my fault.

lying on "mattress graves.

Between them, the sciences of textual criticism, archaeology, physics, and molecular biology have shown religious myths to be false and man-made and have also succeeded in evolving better and more enlightened explanations.

Which mere primate is so damn sure that he can know the mind of god?

So there are laws that are defensible but unenforceable, and there are laws impossible to infringe. But in the New York of Mayor Bloomberg, there are laws that are not possible to obey, and that nobody can respect, and that are enforced by arbitrary power. The essence of tyranny is not iron law. It is capricious law. Tyranny can be petty. And "petty" is not just Bloomberg's middle name. It is his name.

Nothing optional—from homo-sexuality to adultery—is ever made punishable unless those who do the prohibiting (and exact the fierce punishments) have a repressed desire to participate. As Shakespeare put it in King Lear, the policeman who lashes the whore has a hot need to use her for the very offense for which he plies the lash.

There was also the time that competitors were asked to submit a paragraph of a Graham Greene parody: Greene himself entered under a pseudonym and placed third.

The attitude of religion to medicine, like the attitude of religion to science, is always necessarily problematic and very often necessarily hostile. A modern believer can say and even believe that his faith is quite compatible with science and medicine, but the awkward fact will always be that both things have a tendency to break religion's monopoly, and have often been fiercely resisted for that reason.

Friends, somebody said, are "god's apology for relations." I

Religion was our first attempt at philosophy, just as alchemy was our first attempt at chemistry and astrology our first attempt to make sense of the movements of the heavens.

This revulsion is innate in any healthy person, and does not need to be taught.

One ought not to quarrel with the aim of impartiality. It is just that, as an objective, it is harder to attain than its advocates imagine.

ground)—"He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her"—has entered our literature and our consciousness. This episode

he none the less argued that 'an avidity to punish is always dangerous to liberty' because it can accustom a nation 'to stretch, to misinterpret, and to misapply even the best of laws'.

Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake. The grave will supply plenty of time for silence.

Sigmund Freud estaba bastante en lo cierto cuando en El porvenir de una ilusión describía el impulso religioso como algo esencialmente imposible de erradicar hasta que la especie humana venza su miedo a la muerte y su tendencia al pensamiento

If god really wanted people to be free of such thoughts, he should have taken more care to invent a different species.

the Clinton administration always had its banana republic side. For all the talk about historic presidential "philandering," it is hard to recall any other White House which has had to maintain a quasi-governmental or para-state division devoted exclusively to the bullying and defamation of women. Like